"Some day there will be little CynicalMagicianettes, casting spells randomly on 30 year old women. Will they steal your wife? Probably."
-SlingsNArrows
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| A Heartwarming Little Tale | | | Author: | | | IP: | DHCPP189XXXX | | Date: | 02/20/01 03:02 | | Game Type: | Starcraft | | Labels: | none | | Report Rating: , # of Ratings: 1, Max: 7, Min: 7
Lifetime Rating for Lilim: 7.0000 |  |
This is the story of a relatively unskilled Starcraft player (me), an arrogant Shared Bases junkie (my opponent), and how I learned that good will always triumph over evil, even in evil's very heart. In other words, the moral of this story is going to simply be that Shared Bases people suck. And it's a text-only, although I REALLY wish I'd taken some screenshots. Anyway, if you don't really care about a simple tale like this, go read a different BR from a Hall-of-Famer (I'm partial to Drefsab's Monday Night Starcrafts and everything by Heartcutter and Fractal_Wave, myself).
Still here? Cool. Anyway, here's what happened:
The internet connection at my college really sucks. It was okay at the beginning of the year, but it's gotten progressively worse, to the point where Battle.net doesn't even really work anymore. So I've been spending the last couple of weeks immensely frustrated, because I'd just started to read and learn from the BRs here, and to notice a real improvement in my own game, when all of a sudden, I couldn't play online anymore. So, when I discovered that there's a few guys on campus who play Brood War, and that one of them lives right down the hall from me, I immediately asked him if he'd like to play a few games over the LAN. He agreed. When I told him that I had Brood War, and that we wouldn't need to play vanilla, he was happy. "Oh, good," he told me, "you might actually be a challenge."
Hmmm... am I about to have my skills tested against a real live gosu player? Um... no.
He creates a game, and I join... and discover that it's on a Shared Bases variant, and that our opponents are to be a pair of comps. Argh... this was not what I had in mind, but, desperate to play ANY multiplayer SC, I agree.
We win easily. I SCV rush the poor comp right next door to me (I couldn't bring myself to do anything other than cheese in such a silly game), while he takes his time and gets a group of zealots together to kill the zerg right next door to him. After this painfully stupid excuse for a game, I ask him if we can play a 1v1 now... on a real map, please? He tentatively agrees, and our first real game starts on Lost Temple.
He chooses Toss and comes in at 6, while I random to Toss and appear at 3. I go 8 pylon, 10 gateway, and then pylon, gateway, pylon, gas, while scouting with the probe who warped in the second pylon. I find him at 6, the first place I looked, and, as his zealots are not blocking his ramp, I take a leisurely promenade around his base, getting the zealots to chase my probe as it merrily inspects his build order. He seems to be doing more or less what I'm doing, but he's opted for an early double-forge as well, for upgrades apparently, as I see no signs of any cannons. This places him a little behind my own zealot count, but I decide not to immediately attack. My plucky little probe succeeds in escaping his base, and heads up to 9 to possibly expand later on.
Back at home, I've brought in a third gateway, along with a forge of my own and a cy core. I've been pumping zealots nonstop, but I switch over to goons as soon as the core is up. When I've got 4 or 5 dragoons to accompany maybe 10 zealots, I march them down to his base while warping in a pylon in front of my natural in preparation for an expansion.
I park my army outside his natural while another plucky probe zips into his base to reconnoiter. The ramp is still wide open, and his zealot army has grown some, but not much (he's got perhaps 8 zealots to my 10 zealots, 5 goons, and a few others back at base). What is the cause of his delay? Well, it's not cannons, as my probe fails to encounter a single photon blast during his inspection of the base. At the back of the base, however, Mr. Probe discovers a citadel and an archives that have warped in next to the double forges. Aha. Dark Templar. This explains why he was so happy that I had Brood War. Ooookaaay... I commence warping of a few carefully-placed cannons at my main and my incoming natural, start up a robo facility with an eye towards observers, and immediately move my army up his ramp and into his base.
His zealots are toasted with only a 2 losses of my own, his probes are quickly slaughtered, and his nexus most of the way destroyed before the first three dark templar appear from his gateways. I ignore the caped shitheads and continue wrecking his base, losing most of my army but taking down his archives, citadel, and the pylons powering his gateways. When I'm down to 2 zealots and a dragoon, and he's down to 4 dark templar (he managed to get one more out) and a mostly-destroyed base, I send my remaining guys hightailing it back to base. His dtemps obligingly follow, right into the teeth of my natural's cannons, and are quickly torn up, at which point he concedes.
Okay, so that was one fairly pathetic game. Smarting from the loss, and apparently unwilling to admit that his mad Shared Bases skillz really ARE worthless on any real map, my opponent agreed to a Temple rematch.
I won't subject you to the details of that second game, because you've already read them. I kid you not, the second game proceeded EXACTLY the same as the first, except that I started at 9 and he started at 12. Other than that, it went precisely the same: I go zealot/dragoon from three gateways, scout him twice, find him doing a sort of half-assed dt rush, and kill his probes just as the first dts are coming online. The only difference was that this time, I had observers with me when I attacked, so I didn't even need to bring the dtemps back to my base to finish them off.
He conceded, and said he wanted to grab a smoke outside before our next game.
I met him downstairs and had a Pepsi while he smoked his cigarette, and we talked. He told me that it came as no surprise to him that he couldn't play a "limited money game," as he called it, because he hadn't played anything but Shared Bases for about a year. Not wanting to be an asshole, I told him some nice stuff about how I thought Shared Bases wasn't really worse than normal money maps, just different. "Like, it takes a lot of skill to constantly pump out units like you have to on Shared Bases," I told him, in the most sincere voice I could muster. (I'd like to thank the Academy...)
At this point, he made the pronouncement that finally got me a little mad: "Yeah, but on Shared Bases, you couldn't beat me. Nobody could beat me on Shared Bases. I'm, like, the BEST on that map. I know exactly what to build, and when to build it, to win. I haven't lost a game in like half a year. I've gotten disconnected a couple of times, but I've never lost. I'm absolutely the best." And he wouldn't shut up. He just went on and on about how great he was on this stupid, no-skill, dumbed-down, training-wheels newbie map, and finally, something in me just snapped. I knew then that, even though I'm not a particularly good Starcraft player, the responsibility had fallen on me to prove definitively that real Starcraft skill will always triumph over mucho-money idiocy.
"Okay, how about if we play on Shared Bases for the next one?" I asked him.
"Okay," he snickered, "but you'll be sorry."
Back in my room, waiting for him to finish his cigarette so we could start the game, I found myself a little nervous. I mean, sure, he was a Shared Bases newbie, but we were going to be on his turf here, playing a map that's almost as different from Big Game Hunters as Big Game Hunters is from real Starcraft, a map that he'd been playing exclusively for a year and which I'd played a grand total of three times, including our comp stomp at the beginning of the evening. All the strategies that I knew to be idiotic on real maps would actually work here, while many good strats would be rendered useless. But all of that just made me want to beat him even more, to prove that the best Shared Baser is still worse than a low-average player of real Starcraft.
He finished his cigarette, returned, and created the game. I noticed, as the timer ticked down, that this wasn't just any Shared Bases map we were playing on. It was a variant that my opponent himself had created. (I don't know why the hell I thought that would make a difference, since when you've seen one Shared Bases map, you've seen them all, but like I said, I was nervous.)
We start, with him choosing Toss (I don't think he ever plays anything else) and appearing someplace up top, while I random to Zerg at the bottom. I clone off the drones, and busily try to figure out what build order one uses on a wide open map with no terrain and infinite minerals. Deciding to just go with what I know, I do an 8 lord, 12 hatch build, and am forced to place the hatchery out in the open beyond my stupid little mineral niche thingy. Plunking it down out in the middle of nowhere like that, unable to use it to shield my drones at all, makes me wince, but I don't have a choice. I immediately lay down a spawining pool just inside the little "choke point" made by the two gas geysers at the corners of my mineral niche, and continue to pump drones.
My biggest concern here is not falling behind in drone production, since I've been known to not produce enough drones even on Lost Temple, so it's a very real risk that I'll be outresourced since I'm not used to having this many mineral patches to draw on. I'm also worried about not building enough hatcheries, so I throw up another hatchery, right next to the first one outside my base, for a grand total of three.
My spawning pool finishes, and I start a creep colony in the mouth of my niche, just as a zealot wanders down and starts pounding on my morphing third hatchery. I ignore him as he whittles at the hatchery, instead morphing the colony into a sunken and starting my first two larvae worth of zerglings. The zerglings and the giant subterranean anal probe finish off Zealot Number 1 just as two more zealots appear. Seeing that 8 more zerglings have suddenly appeared to accompany the first 4, these two zealots choose the better part of valor and bugger off. While this is going on, I have morphed 2 extractors over my back two geysers (aaargh... four geysers in one base... the memory is painful...)
I send a suicidal zergling scout up to have a looksee over his base, and discover a giant complex of eight gateways, along with a double forge, all pumping merrily away, with an intimidatingly large pack of zealots forming up in front of them. And sure enough, there's the cyber core; he's preparing to tech up, except here on Shared Bases, he'll be able to field as many templar, archons, corsairs, and eventually carriers as he wants. Feeling a slight degree of consternation, I throw down two more hatcheries and an evo chamber and start macroing zerglings while upgrading to Lair.
Shortly after Mr. Suicide Zergling dies, a second scouting ling sees the whole giant crew of zealots trooping down towards my base. I've been 1sz2sz3sz-ing from all my hatches as fast as I can, so I form my lings into an open crescent at the mouth of the bridge his zealots are crossing, and then close them in around his single-file army. Even with this formation advantage, his army is depressingly large, and most of my zerglings go down with them, leaving perhaps ten lings standing after the last zealot dies.
Knowing that, given his hideous number of gateways, he's probably already got a dozen more zealots back at his base, I consider retreating and hooking up with my next wave of zerglings, but I realize that that's exactly how he wants me to play. Shared Bases people think that there's nothing to the game but massing giant armies and smashing them together until someone finally gives in. If I let him get me thinking like that, I'm playing his game, and just asking to get stomped. So, instead of playing like a Shared Bases newb, I remember to think like a real Starcraft player, and send my ten lings on a breakneck charge, right past his new army of zealots, between his gateways, and straight into his mineral niche.
The thing about Shared Bases is that, while you have tons of open space to build your base, all that space is more or less separate from your mineral field itself. It's almost as if the map's creator wanted the mineral line to be "off limits," as though it's regrettable that that aspect of the game even exists. Unfortunately, that means that, if you can just get an attack force into that tiny, cramped mineral pocket choked with probes, it's REALLY freakin' hard for your opponent to get it back out with melee units like zealots.
It was glorious. I really, really wish I had a screenshot of my opponent swearing as his zealots stumble around trying to find a way through the gateways and back into the mineral niche, while my zerglings freely pound away on the probes. In just a few seconds, the probes are gone. By the time he finally manages to kill the last of the little buggers, a fresh attack wave has formed at my base.
About this time, he starts complaining that his mouse sucks. At least he didn't try to call me a hacker.
He hastily tries to throw up some cannons to ward them off, but he can't afford that many, since all the resources in the world won't do you any good if you don't have any probes to collect them. The zergling wave kills most of his zealots and cannons before dying, and the next, even bigger wave is on its way in when he concedes, saying something like "ok, ok fine, you're the grand emporer of dune" I have no idea what he meant by that, and I didn't really feel like asking.
After the game ended, I wandered down to the room where he was playing (and where, I might add, his girlfriend and a bunch of other people were watching him play), and told him that my computer had inexplicably frozen, so it looked like we wouldn't be able to play anymore that night (my computer was just fine, but I suspected that he was getting a little sick of getting trounced with an audience watching, and I wanted to give him a face-saving way out of playing any more.) I also agreed, with a straight face, that, yeah, it can be really tough playing with a bad mouse, and I thanked him for the good games. He mumbled something in reply, and his girlfriend commented, "Wow, you were really kicking his ass." Personally, I don't think it was very nice of her to say that right in front of him, as he was probably quite embarassed enough, but whatever. That's between the two of them to work out.
And that's the battle report. I know, I know, this was a series of stupid games against a stupid player, there's not much of anything to learn from three games that were over almost immediately after I annihilated his probes. But that last game mattered to me. I know that a good Starcraft player can always waste a Shared Bases newb, no matter what the map, but I'm NOT a very good Starcraft player, and so it felt good to know that, even if I'm not gosu, at least I'm learning the proper way.
Thanks for reading, and next time, if I can find another LAN player, or if they ever improve the internet connection like they keep saying they're going to, I promise that the next BR will be about a better game, and it'll have screenshots and everything. Peace out.
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